Transcontinental Race No5, 2017: Segment Times

I’ve just published a full analysis of the results for the Transcontinental Race No5, 2017. I received some questions about the segment times that I briefly mentioned in the comments for some riders, so this post contains a file with more information than you could ever want. All data is taken from the official results.

The image below is a thumbnail version of a very large pdf file, so click the image or this link: Segment Times.pdf, but be warned that the file size and image size are very large. If you don’t want an overwhelming amount of information, then I highly recommend only looking at the far simpler and nicer-formatted table on the main results page.

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The table contains the rankings at every checkpoint and the rankings for the times between the checkpoints. As well as looking at the 5 segment times between the start (“St”), 4 checkpoints (“CP”) and finish (“Fin”), it’s also possible to look at the time from the start to each checkpoint and from each checkpoint to the finish. As an example, “CP2-CP3” refers to the time elapsed between someone having their brevet card stamped at CP2 and the time it was stamped at CP3. These are not times to complete the required parcours (route) at each checkpoint.

The number of people who passed each checkpoint varied as people scratched along the route. The absolute positions are therefore not really comparable between checkpoints, so relative positions are more useful. Percentile ranks are therefore given, with 100% referring to the person with the best (shortest) time for that section and 75% meaning that the person was faster than 75% of the people who also completed that section. Colors are used to make it easier to see what relative position every segment time was for every person.

The finish times do not include any penalties, but the overall standings given in the left-hand column do. There is also no distinction between people who were officially classified with a position or just with “Finisher”. Pairs and individuals are also included in the rankings together, with pairs taking two positions (both members of a pair were given the slower of the two individual’s times when there was a difference).

These rankings in no way replace the official rankings, it’s just a different way of looking at everyone’s performance during the race. If anyone is unhappy about the focus on times then they should remember that the event has “Race” in the title, so this is inevitable. Some people don’t treat it like a race, and more of a personal challenge, which is perfectly fine, but eventually everyone’s performance gets analyzed in the same way.

I wasn’t going to publish this because it would take too long to explain it properly and to present it nicely, but as I said, I’ve had a few requests, so I’m publishing this just for those who are interested. However, I recommend most people to ignore it and only look at the main results page.